Advice on How to Destroy Your Reputation Using the Internet

The following post is from Stephen Texeira.

Everybody likes shiny, new things, right? After all, they’re new and, well, shiny. And it’s that very newness that makes joining Twitter,  Facebook and all those other online communities so tempting. I see a lot of companies dipping their toes into the waters of social media and then quickly pulling them out; Facebook pages with no updates in six months, Twitter accounts with thousands of followers and three tweets, and blogs that have nothing more than a welcome message. These are among the surest ways to damage your reputation online.

I recently came across an excellent synopsis of some of the more effective ways to damage your online brand, written by B.L. Ochman on whatsnextblog. Mr. Ochman suggests you undertake some or all of the following if you really want to mess things up:

1. Start a Twitter account and then don’t use it — an even better suggestion than mine. He gives the example of @TimeWarnerCares. They currently have 571 followers (eight joined since Mr. Ochman’s post), no description of who they are and no tweets. Do they really care? It would seem unlikely. As Mr. Ochman so ably puts it, “If you don’t want to listen and respond, don’t start a Twitter account.”
2. Don’t track your brand or monitor online in any way — apparently Mr. Ochman really has an issue with TimeWarner (TW) and hasn’t received any response to his complaints. So, TW is online and apparently wanting to care, but they don’t pay attention when people are talking about them. That’s like walking into a room and saying, “Aren’t I a grand guy?” and then walking out and letting the conversation continue without you. It’s unlikely that the conclusion will be that you are, indeed, a grand guy.
3. Start a social media program without telling the staff — I would expand this to do anything public without telling the staff. This is great, because when the public calls with questions about some new program, the staff won’t have any idea what they’re talking about. This makes the company look incompetent and the staff look stupid. Everybody wins!

In reality, you have to work hard to ruin your reputation online. If you remember a few simple rules, you shouldn’t have any trouble staying in the game.

1. Social media is like a raffle at a convention hall — you must be present to win.
2. Social media has the same rules of conduct as any other type of conversation: be polite, respond when spoken to and treat people as equals.
3. Social media mandates openness and honesty. This is actually true of any kind of media. With thousands of people talking about you online, you are unlikely to be able to keep anything secret for too long, so don’t try.
4. Finally, social media is here to stay. The longer you think of it as a fad and drag your feet about getting involved, the more you look like you’re living in the 20th century.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

The following post is from  Stephen Texeira.

Not a lot to say today, just have you seen this video yet? It’s produced by the guys over at Socialnomics.net and it’s a pretty powerful argument that social media is here to stay; that social media represents a fundamental change in the way we communicate. Not just how professional communicators like me and you and most of the people reading this blog communicate, but how the entire world communicates; how mothers communicate with their sons; how fathers communicate with their uncles and how grandmothers communicate with their husbands.

This time, the revolution is not only being televised, it is being podcast, streamed and tweeted, and it’s gonna be all right.

Using Your RMS Report

The following post is from Robin Texeira, an Associate of Wide Angle Communications.

Now that you’ve signed up for a reputation monitoring service, what do you do when you receive your first report?

Read it! Look at your search engine rankings. When consumers search for your hospital are they finding what you want them to find? Your first page of search results should reflect the image you want to spread about your hospital.  There are ways to improve your search  results. Look into them if you aren’t seeing what you want.

Check any blog comments made about your hospital. There may not be  a lot but even one means someone is talking about you. It took only one blogger complaining about his problems with a Dell computer to launch a revolution in Dell’s customer service attitude.

Respond. This is probably the most important thing you can do. A common blog posting I see for hospitals will be from a new parent. They are sharing pictures , bragging about the new baby and in doing so they mention the hospital where the child was born. Find the appropriate person in your hospital — the chief medical officer, chief nursing officer, risk manager, CEO or whomever you think appropriate — and get them to post a comment on the blog. Something as simple as thanks for mentioning us, we’re glad you choose our hospital for the birth of your child and that you had a positive experience with us. That’s it. You don’t have to sell yourself, go into detail or ask questions. It will take five minutes and can end up generating a lot of goodwill for your hospital.

Be prepared. For negative comments, bad search results, no search results. You have a crisis communications plans, right? Does it include how to handle an on-line reputation crisis? It should. You need to know how you’re going to respond if, for example, there were a major medical error at your hospital and someone starts blogging about it.

You may find that little is being said in social media about your hospital. So why bother checking? Why get involved? The benefit of starting a conversation is that it allows you to establish the direction future conversations will follow. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is to start a blog. Get your community talking about you. Start a blog where patients post experiences they have during their hospital stay – good or bad. Start a hospital team blog and let staff share their thoughts on the future of your hospital, the current healthcare situation, whatever strikes their fancy.

Social media in the form we know it today may look entirely different five years from now. But be assured that communication via social media on the Internet will continue to grow and evolve into a phenomenon that will require more and more participation on the part of organizations. The days when you can ignore what your community is saying and figure they need you no matter what are gone.

Why & How To Monitor Your Online Reputation

The following post is from Robin Texeira, an Associate of Wide Angle Communications.

If you are a hospital PIO or administrator, you probably keep pretty close tabs on your hospital’s reputation in the local community. You read your local newspaper, talk with your peers, solicit feedback from staff and carefully monitor information released to the public. Your job’s done now, right? Absolutely not. If that is all you are currently doing, you have a gaping hole in your reputation management policy.

According to IDC, a marketing intelligence firm, the use of social networking applications is predicted to increase 815% by 2009. Use of social media is continually evolving from the personal to marketing applications and customer service. There is really no better reason to monitor your reputation than this. There are a lot of people talking about service and somewhere in those conversations, at some point, your hospital’s name is going to be mentioned.

A simple Google search can reveal much about your hospital. A recent search on a local hospital turned up, on the first page of results, an article on the increase in the salary of the hospital’s CEO. That may not be the first piece of information you’d like to share with your community. To protect your reputation you need to know what you look like online. You need to monitor what is being said about your hospital and your staff.

Pretty easy right? Just plug your name into Google and see what turns up. That’s a great first step, however, there is far more available on the Internet and simply monitoring Google isn’t going to tell you all you need to maintain and build your online reputation. What a quick Google search will tell you is that there are a lot of reputation monitoring services available today. How do you make a choice?

Let’s take a short commercial break for a bit of shameless self-promotion. There is only one reputation monitoring service that brings 25+ years of healthcare experience to the table. Wide Angle Communications recently introduced RMS – our Reputation Monitoring Service.  When you’re talking about maintaining your hospital’s reputation, you want to work with a company that understands the special needs of hospitals. Our customized report provides you with the tools to analyze your online presence and make necessary changes. Take a look at our site and tune in next week when we’ll look at how to use your report.

Your Online Reputation

The following post is from Robin Texeira, an Associate with Wide Angle Communications.

Your hospital’s reputation is important to you. Carefully crafted reports are released to the media and only certain individuals serve as spokespersons for your hospital. You care what your community is saying and want to ensure you are being presented in the best light.  In today’s participatory Web 2.0 world, you have to do much more than that. Careful reputation management means monitoring what is being said about you online also.

Andy Beal, the author of Radically Transparent, was recently interviewed by ABC News broadcast America This Morning. Beal talks about protecting your online reputation and offers some tips for improving your search standing. Watch the video and give some thought to what is being said about you online!

View the video here:  ABC News Interview with Andy Beal

Social Media & Healthcare: Part 2

The following post is from Robin Texeira, an associate with Wide Angle Communications.

Since you are reading a blog we can start with the assumption that you know what a blog is and the purpose it serves. Do you really though? You are probably reading this blog because someone recommended it to you or maybe you just followed a link and ended up here. However you arrived, you’re here, you’re reading and expecting you will gain information. Is that the purpose of a blog – to disseminate information? Not really. While there is definitely an informational component to blogging, it is more than that. At heart blogging is about conversations, about communication. While you are reading this posting, ideally you are thinking about comments you might leave. You’ll leave the comment, I’ll answer. We’ve had a conversation and that conversation is online for the world to see forever.

You can get online anytime and read an article about healthcare management, marketing or just about any topic you are interested in. Blogging isn’t about that. It is about communication. Perhaps you are a hospital Public Information Officer (PIO). Why do you care what Joe Smith is saying on his blog about your hospital? Maybe you don’t but let’s look at it from a different angle. What if Joe Smith is the parent of your child’s classmate? You meet at a school event and in the course of conversation mention that you are the PIO for XYZ Hospital. It happens that Joe’s mother had an operation at your hospital and received poor treatment from a couple of nurses. He shares this with you. Do you care now? I sure hope so because you just found out that you have a dissatisfied customer. Ideally you’ll go to the work the next day and see if you can find out what happened with Joe’s mother. Next time you see him you’ll be able to explain that what happened was an anomaly and next time his mother will receive better service.

How does this relate to blogging? Well, Joe Smith has a blog. That night when he sits down to write something he remembers how you followed up on the poor service his mother received. He remembers that a representative from your hospital cared. And he writes a blog posting about it. XYZ Hospital, and probably your name, are now online for anyone in the world to read about.

You may never meet Joe Smith, or any of the people that use your hospital, at a social event. Nevertheless, they are talking to you. Technorati, a blog search engine, tracks more than 112 million blogs. The odds are that someone in one of those blogs has mentioned or soon will mention your hospital. You need to be part of that conversation.

Blogging is communication. It is about having a conversation with someone you may never meet. That conversation is not limited to your community or even your state. They spread around the world and with that conversation goes your hospital’s reputation. Next time you read a blog post remember that someone is speaking to you. Respond.

Social Media & Healthcare: Part 1

The following post is from Robin Texeira, an associate with Wide Angle Communications.

Social Media: Blogs, Podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Wikis, Flickr. What exactly is Social Media and what is its relevance for healthcare marketing?

According to Wikipedia, Social Media is an umbrella term defining the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

Social media is interactive, immediate and powerful. It is about communication. Direct, personal communication between individuals. A patient comes into a hospital and has a negative experience. Ten years ago they might have gone home, complained to their family and a few friends and that would have been the end. The damage to the hospital’s reputation would be minimal. Today that patient may post a negative review of the hospital on their blog. They might talk about it on Twitter or mention it on Facebook or Digg. All these actions can bring the name of a hospital to the attention of millions of readers around the world.

The impact that social media will have on healthcare is just beginning to emerge. User-generated content, composed of blogs, wikis and social networking sites allow users to share their thoughts with the world. The speed with which stories, rumors, and guesses can spread online is frightening and once it is out there all that’s left is damage control.

Next week we’ll look in depth at some specific social media sites and how they impact healthcare.